The present invention relates generally to a teeth cleaning device.
There are numerous little gaps in between human teeth. To effectively clean the surface and the gaps has always been a challenge to consumers in their everyday lives. Since not all teeth are born or maintained to have uniformly regular shapes, the task of effective cleaning is made even more difficult.
Though many traditional manual tools are available, such as spools of floss, and floss made onto a small toothpick type stick for easy holding, they do not achieve an ideal level of desired teeth cleaning effect. Electrically-powered and water-jetting based tools became popular.
One popular type of water jetting teeth cleaning device consist of a spray nozzle 1, a water pump 2, water inlet 8 on said nozzle, water outlet 9 on said water pump. A reciprocating piston inside said water pump causes water to go into spray nozzle 1 and produces pulsating water jet streams to come out of the nozzle's external end.
A brush tip 5 (or a short length of a floss) is connecting to a piston 6 rested in the junction area of said nozzle, so that when the brush tip 5 is pushed out (by the pulsating water jets), it will be retracted back in by a spring 7 inside said nozzle.
The oscillating/reciprocating function of the brush tip 5 (or a floss tip) helps to achieve the cleaning on the surface of the teeth.
Reference prior art drawings in FIGS. 1 & 2.
This type of simple design depends on the “positive” pressure going from the pump 2 towards the nozzle 1. Due to the inherent nature of the spring's resilient force, the brush tip's action, especially at the stage where the brush tip is nearly extended out of the nozzle tip, where the pulsating water pressure is at its lowest and the spring's resilient force is at its strongest, the brushing/cleaning power is weakened, due to the “mutual cancellation” effect inherent in this type of design.
To overcome the “weaker” retraction action of the brush tip, some devices employ higher water pumping pressure. Though simple to do so, another downside quickly shows: the spring is unable to provide its full retracting force, so as to result in full range travel of the brush tip.
As such, the brush tip's cleaning power to reach into tooth gaps is quite limited.
In light of such “mutual cancellation” problem, present invention uses a one-way valve actuated by a transmission device to produce negative pressure that produces the retraction force of the brush tip (or floss line), thus providing fuller travel of the brush tip (or floss line) and stronger-torqued reciprocating piston motions (use of bevel gears for speed reduction and torque enhancement), resulting in more effective teeth cleaning water-jetting and back-and-forth flossing movement, even if the source of the water pump is at the same power output level as the traditional device.
A spring can optionally be placed inside piston connection assembly, around a piston rod, to help with the back-and-forth oscillating action of the tube piston, which drives the flossing tip's motion.
The modular design of present invention allows different materials of floss to be affixed to the floss holding component, to work on different surface of teeth and gaps between teeth, as the users prefer. By the use of the reciprocating water jetting streams, at exemplary frequency of 30 Hz, the effective cleaning function achieved by the design of present invention will exceed that of the traditional simple water-jetting devices.